But waiting at a motel in Santa Clara had been a new boyfriend, Norm, a construction worker who the reader can sense immediately was a real baddie. He advised Terry to kick the neighborhood dogs that chased the boy on his rusty Schwinn Phantom, called him a “pantywaist” on his 9th birthday, grabbed him by his testicles after his 10th and was rumored to have killed a man in Venezuela.
Finding some success as a realtor, Norm showed himself to be anti-Semitic, racist, sexist. He drove drunk, lied, ogled, cheated and finally slapped Irma so hard she fell. By then a jocky teen, Terry retaliated by hitting his stepfather in the head with a bench, and that’s pretty much the end of their relationship — except the couple also had a daughter, Cheryl, mostly an afterthought in this story. The author’s anger lingers, he writes: “bone-hard, comforting like a familiar scar.”
“Irma” is told in three parts, and in the second McDonell, who came of age in the era of New Journalism, makes the very New Journalistic choice to swerve into the third person. It’s hard to know what to make of this, except that he seems to be squinting anew at the very cosmopolitan successes documented in “An Accidental Life,” and perhaps too at his considerable sexual conquests.
He struggles to remember the name of a woman he got pregnant before alighting on “Kathleen.” After Kathleen and a hippie who’s just joined a commune comes Nadine, an Air France stewardess from Nantes. Then it’s to New York, where he writes approvingly of feminist demonstrators “pinching his ass” on Fifth Avenue.
After dabbling in art, McDonell had set out to “make literature in a manly way” and came to be known for his fraternity of very male writers (Thomas McGuane, Hunter S. Thompson, James Salter). Here he affirms his allyship with the sisterhood, maybe a little too strenuously. “He never leered” like Norm, he reassures us. He befriended Kay Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, and noted Irma’s resemblance to Gloria Steinem.
